A comprehensive performance evaluation of objective quality metrics for contrast enhancement techniques

In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and comparison of state-of-the-art Contrast Enhancement (CE) evaluation metrics. In this work, we developed a new database consisting of 182 images. The subjective experiments were performed to obtain a preference rating from different observers for the enhanced images using six CE methods selected from different representative categories. The quality of the enhanced images is measured with most commonly used CE evaluation metrics. We provide the ranking of images based on perceptual preference as well as objective quality metrics scores. We show that some of the metrics used for the enhancement evaluation are not consistent with the human subjective scores. This new database, named as Contrast Enhancement Evaluation Database (CEED2016), is made publicly available to the research community at http://wwwl2ti.univ-paris13.fr/site/index.php/en/CEED2016/ and is expected to be a contribution to the area of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and particularly for image quality enhancement evaluation.